Seeking The Deity In The Details
The Cambrian Explosion
Both Charles Darwin himself and contemporary neo-Darwinists such as Francisco Ayala, Richard Dawkins, and Richard Lewontin acknowledge that biological organisms appear to have been designed by an intelligence. Yet classical Darwinists and contemporary Darwinists alike have argued that what Francisco Ayala calls the “obvious design” of living things is only apparent. As Ayala, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has explained: “The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”
According to Darwin and his contemporary followers, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation is sufficient to explain the origin of those features of life that once seemed to require explanation by reference to an intelligent or purposeful designer. Thus, according to Darwinists, the design hypothesis now represents an unnecessary and un-parsimonious explanation for the complexity and apparent design of living organisms. On these as well as methodological grounds contemporary biologists have generally excluded the design hypothesis from consideration as an explanation for the origin of biological form.
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Against Sociobiology
Survival of the Fakest
Let’s change science standards and let students do real science
Should Pennsylvania’s science standards be changed? Draft language for the standards is expected to go before the state legislature early in 2001. According to standards adopted in 1998, students are expected to “know” that “organisms arose from materials and life forms of the past” because of “evidence of evolution in the form of fossils . . . embryological studies and Read More ›
Evolution Debate: Student Leads Textbook Challenge
PERKASIE, Pennsylvania (CNN) — It’s a debate that just won’t go away. The latest battleground over the teaching of evolution in public schools is in the town of Perkasie, Pennsylvania. But what makes this particular debate unique is that the campaign against teaching evolution is being led not by parents or politicians, but a high school student. Joe Baker, 19, Read More ›
The Roots and Remedy of Judicial Imperialism
Where Physics and Politics Meet
Memoirs A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics by Edward Teller Perseus, 544 pp., $35 EDWARD TELLER has undertaken, at the age of ninety-three, to tell the story of his life. In conducting an exercise of this sort, most men find much to admire, but little to censure in themselves. An autobiography thus tends to be an exercise in Read More ›
Intelligent Design Coming Clean
1. Cards on the Table In the movie Dream Team starring Michael Keaton, Keaton plays a psychiatric patient who must feign sanity to save his psychiatrist from being murdered. In protesting his sanity, Keaton informs two New York City policemen that he doesn’t wear women’s clothing, that he’s never danced around Times Square naked, and that he doesn’t talk to Read More ›